


the greater part

by puppyblue



Series: AU!Corvo [2]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Ableism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blacksmith Corvo, Classism, Low Chaos Daud (Dishonored), M/M, Magic, Physical Disability, Post-Game, Protective Siblings, Sexism, Witchcraft, never-the-lord-protector-corvo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-22 04:44:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15574068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puppyblue/pseuds/puppyblue
Summary: Corvo Attano is just an unremarkable blacksmith in a simple Serkonan town and he really has no idea why all these heretics keep popping up when he's not looking.





	the greater part

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't read any of the books related to Dishonored, so the only canon thing here about Beatrici is her plan to run away. Anything else is coincidence.

Corvo first heard of Dunwall's troubles from his sister.

"They're going to put up a blockade," Beatrici complained to him, slamming her tools on the table, passionate and loud as she so often was in a temper. "Captain Riley told me this morning."

"A blockade?" He glanced up from his book—not particularly interested, but aware that she would only get louder if he didn't indulge her. "What for?"

"They say it's a plague. Too many bodies now for any normal sickness." She grimaced, sharing his instinctive distaste at the thought. "The Empress sent her Royal Protector out to talk with the Duke, but no one wants to risk that spreading. It could be _years_ before they open passage again."

"I thought you didn't like Dunwall," he reminded her. "Too cold."

"Some of my best customers are there! And the Academy is always worth a visit," She growled and then flopped into her seat with a huff. Then, after a moment or two of silence, she sighed and admitted, "It's not my favorite, no. But still..."

"Not worth the risk," he murmured. "You've plenty of customers elsewhere."

"Easy for you to say," She sulked. "You find more than enough buyers here."

That was true enough—a good blacksmith never really needed to worry, between the guards, the Overseers, and the needs of citizens with coin to spend. And neither was it bragging to say that he was better than merely _good._ His sister's art required more effort to sell, needed a wider audience. That usually suited her wanderlust, though, and they lived well enough between them.

In fact, she only ever complained of the fact when she wanted to win an argument, which he suspected was the case here. She’d had few kind things to say about the capitol of the Empire in the past—Gristolian nobles tended to disdain her background and her work with it. He'd heard that rant often enough as well.

"You'd be bored in a week if you only sold here." He yawned and stretched. His leg twinged, an itch too dull to be called pain. "Weren't you planning a trip to Tyvia soon, anyway?"

"That's true." She brightened again, her quick temper just as fast to settle. "If I have to wait for Dunwall to simmer down as it is..."

"There you go." He nodded and turned back to his book. "And by the time you've circled the other isles, the trouble might well be over with."

"Hmph. So sensible, little crow." She teased him. "Now, what do you want me to bring you?"

 

* * *

...

He didn’t remember very much about the cause of his injury. 

The pain was easy, of course, the first shock of cold steel sliding deep into the back of his leg. He knew he’d walked, made it to the physician, but the memories tended to blur into a fog after that, an indecipherable burble of voices and over-bright smear of fever dreams bleeding into a pain-soaked reality.

The physicians had said that was normal—the fever had hit him hard not long after, and it wasn’t unusual to lose time and memories in the endless heat. So when he chose to think about it now, even decades later, it mostly came as flashes.

It had been an accident, they’d told him afterwards, when he’d finally clawed his way back to coherency: when he’d fought past fever and infection and found his sister slumped in the chair by his bedside, pale and haggard. Simply an accident—another boy had tripped and he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Commonplace, not surprising, they saw this sort of injury all the time—shouldn’t he have thought about that before he went off playing with swords?

(He hadn’t much liked those physicians.)

And he’d wondered when he'd heard it—still wondered even now—if it hadn’t been such an accident after all. If the older, richer, higher-born boys who’d sneered and mocked him from the sidelines, who’d ganged up on him in the alleys, who’d never wanted to face him fairly in the training rings, had finally decided to act. An attempt to remove the competition, as it were.

But he supposed he’d never get a true answer for that. And maybe it was better that way.

 

* * *

 

They heard the news about the Empress together, when Beatrici returned for a few days and they ventured into town. There was no loud announcement, no gathering in the town square, but it was still a whisper, a murmur, steady and pervasive, falling from every pair of lips and nailed to every wall.

"She was assassinated, they say." One of Beatrici's friends told them, pale with shock. "Witchcraft, maybe. Got the Overseers riled."

 _"And_ her daughter's gone missing, too," the growers murmured among themselves. "Offering a nice sum to find her, of course, but...well, I wish them luck."

"The Spymaster's taken over." Another ship captain shared when they joined him in the tavern. "Only the day after, they say. Not sure I like the feel of that."

Corvo knew what he meant—the news had hit him hard when he’d first heard, a near-physical shock that tingled up his spine. He'd had no particular feelings towards the Empress. She'd seemed fair enough, as rulers went, but she'd remained distant from Serkonos and left most of the everyday decisions to the Duke. So Dunwall's troubles are not his own, but...

His mother might once have whimsically called it the wind of change: that cold, tingling creep up his spine. He just couldn't shake the unfortunate feeling that that the change would not be a good one.

The glue on the wall was still wet when he leaned against the tavern outside, waiting for Beatrici to finish negotiating passage to Morley with the talkative captain. There were layers of new posters, though some of them were already familiar. The name _Daud_ was notorious even in Serkonos, after all, and Corvo had seen such posters for him before. But this one had increased the reward amount substantially; few outlaws were worth thirty thousand coins.

It wasn’t hard to guess the reason, but Corvo paid it little mind. The Knife of Dunwall had been named such for a reason—there would be very little chance of coming across him in Serkonos.

The other posters were proclamations—of the Empress’ death, of the Spymaster’s ascendance, of Lady Emily’s unfortunate disappearance. He turned away from the Spymaster’s severe likeness with ambivalence, though he glanced with some distant sympathy at the description of Empress Jessamine’s daughter.

He took a moment to offer a quick, uncharacteristic prayer for the poor girl, and thanked the stars that he was far away from the cesspool of misfortune that Dunwall had become.

 

* * *

...

Beatrici stayed with him.

It was a surprise, though a pleasant one—one of the only pleasant things in those early days of recovery. They’d grown apart as they’d grown older and he’d turned his attention to swordplay. She’d never had much of an interest in it and the Grand Guard tended to weed out girls rather quickly.

Now, though, as he struggled from bedridden to walking, heavy with a limp and leaning on rough-carved wooden sticks, she was there with a shoulder when he needed it. She helped him change his bandages and poked at the wound to check for fever, and she forced food on him even when eating was the last thing he wanted to do.

(It was never his mother doing these things and he’d never expected such. She cared, yes, but she wasn’t...all there. Not anymore.)

She was overbearing sometimes and he’d snap at her for it. And her patience was even shorter than his, so this often led to rows that left him panting with exertion and her stomping away. She always came back, though, and they would curl up on his bed in the dark like they had when they were smaller and whisper apologies through the small space between them.

“I was going to run away, y’know.” She told him one night and he almost wasn’t surprised. She’d always wanted to leave. “Was going to go to Morley. Had a ship picked out and everything.”

“Why didn’t you, then?” He asked, because by the way she spoke it was a bygone plan, not one still in motion.

“Couldn’t leave you alone like this, could I?” Cloth rustled in the dark, a shrug of sound.

“I’d be fine.” He retorted, but his heart wasn’t really in it and she only kicked him lightly in the shin—his good one.

A moment of silence and then—“You could come with me.”

He blinked in the dark, eyes finding the faint gleam of lamplight sneaking in under the door. “With you…to Morley?”

“Or anywhere. I want to see it all, eventually.” She sighed. “Mum would be fine without us, anyway. I don’t think she remembers we’re here, half the time.”

“Well, I don’t care about seeing it.” He grumbled, though his heart ached at the thought that, eventually, he was going to lose her. “And I can’t just go running off if I want to get into the Guard. I’ll have to start practicing again, as soon as I can shake this limp.”

She was silent—she always was now, when he spoke of training and the Guard. He usually ignored it, but something about the heavy weight of it in the dark irked him more than usual.

“You don’t think I can do it, do you?” He snapped, a sour curl in his stomach making his voice sharper than usual. “You think I’m useless.”

“I’ve never thought you were useless.” She snapped back. “But you know you’re not healing right. The physician said so.”

“I just need more time.” That knot in his stomach twisted tighter and he curled up a little more without thinking. “And even if…even with a limp, I’ll be just as good. Or nearly.”

“Maybe.” She said, quiet like she didn’t want him to hear her. “But you have any limp at all and they’re not going to care. You know that.”

He swallowed hard. “The training master knows what I can do—”

“And you had to fight for months to even get him to look at you.” Her voice was thick, and she's never been one for crying, but he thought maybe she sounded close. “Maybe you were good enough for them to look past blood eventually, but a street rat _and_ a cripple? They’d stick you somewhere out of the way, where they didn’t have to see you, and that’s if they let you in at all. You’d never make officer.”

For a moment, he wanted to hit her, but then her hand found his in the darkness and squeezed tight. He had to close his eyes against the sudden burn rising behind them.

“They don’t _want_ us.” She whispered and he wondered what rejection she’d felt that he’d missed. “And I don’t want to see them hurt you.”

He kept her hand, but said nothing, the silence heavy in his lungs.

The weight grew worse, with time—it was months before he could walk without a stick and no matter how he pushed it, it wasn’t quite right. His lower leg still felt a bit numb sometimes, even when the cut began to scar over, and his foot dangled when he walked, wouldn’t quite straighten when he wanted it to. It tripped him up, slowed him down, and he didn’t have the money to keep talking to the physicians, even the cheap ones.

He could move, though—he was learning, compensating, lifting his foot higher, swinging his leg more. The wound still stung, deep and throbbing sometimes, and he had to run through his sword drills endlessly until he could do them perfectly again without stopping or falling. But he was doing it—he was _fine._

But Beatrici wasn’t wrong, either.

They let him back into the training grounds, let him stand in with his age group. (Well, all right, he’d had to sneak his way in, after some of the newer guards tried to turn him away with kind, sympathetic smiles or harsh, biting words. Eventually, they just stopped bothering to chase him.) It wasn’t the same either, though.

He struggled—his balance was different, his body weakened, and perhaps he hadn’t waited as long as he should have. So many of those boys had always hated him, especially the high-born, and now they sensed a weakness. They went for his legs when he fought them now, or threw rocks, or tripped him when he walked by.

He learned as he went—he’d always been a quick study with blades, and he needed it now. But even as he started to improve, even as he started to _win_ again, all too often he still ended up bloodied in the dust with laughter in his ears. He was getting better, yes, but not fast _enough_ **.**

Perhaps it was arrogant that each loss galled him, but it always lingered at the back of his mind that he’d have been able to beat any of these boys into the dust, before. And the older guards were worse.

The newer ones wouldn’t fight him at all, but the worst were the ones he’d known. The ones who’d used to train with him and the other boys, showing them the ropes. They didn’t hassle him, or tease him. They smiled at him whenever he asked them for a bout, like they might have at a puppy chasing its tail, and then took it _easy_ on him—swung softer, moved slower, called the match to a halt if he tripped or struggled even if he protested until he was blue in the face.

And by the Void, if _pity_ didn’t sting worse than all the laughter combined—

Beatrici found him watching the ships one night, hours after he should have come home. He knew his eyes were likely still red and didn’t turn to look at her. She stood next to him in silence for a while.

“You don’t need to prove anything, you know.” She said finally. “You’re worth more’n any of ‘em.”

“I’m not _trying_ to prove anything.” He said, but couldn’t really muster up the energy to pretend to believe it. It had always been in there somewhere, even years ago.

“Then why do you keep doing this?” She demanded, and she didn’t sound pitying, or sad for him. She sounded the way she did when she wanted to beat on him and rub his face in the dirt and it was a welcome tone, honestly. “Y’don’t need to be a Guard to fight.”

“It’s not just about the swordfights.” He protested, even though it _mostly_ was. That was where the joy had been, anyway. “I don’t want to live in Batista all my life. I want to be more. I—”

He stopped, his breath choking on the _could have been more_ that had almost slipped out without his noticing, and why did it feel like he’d already lost something?

“And you’re going to be.” She said it with a stubborn jut of her chin. “But you don’t have to do it _here.”_

“Like anyone else would take me either.” He muttered and his shoulders hunched. Saying it aloud didn’t make him feel any better.

“Don’t be stupid. There’s plenty out there.” She glared at him. “And if you’ve got to fight, the mercs don’t care what you look like or your blood, long as you can swing. And sailors battle pirates all the time, and make lots of prize money from it, _and_ they’ve got wooden legs.”

He huffed a breath through his nose that was almost a laugh and didn’t speak, but he couldn’t stop his own thoughts. His leg ached and his eyes itched and right now he hated the whole damn isle of Serkonos, from the guards watching him walk to the cobblestones that caught his toes and tripped him.

He could do it. Joining the Guard had been his dream and he _knew_ he could do it…but something raw inside of him almost didn’t want to anymore.

Beatrici sighed beside him, swaying to bump her shoulder against his. He glanced at her, tired and sore—she’d been his support through all of this, and if she left...

“Come to Morley with me.” She said, so earnest as she took his hand again and this time…hesitantly, uncertainly, this time he agreed.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not going to write anything new, I says 
> 
> I need to finish my old projects first, I says


End file.
